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Open access 'revolution' in the news

The Guardian has published 2 articles using the term 'academic spring' to describe revolutionary changes in academic publishing, and Radio 4's Today programme highlights a call to 'share research papers'.

The Director of the Wellcome Trust, Sir Mark Walport, also spoke on Radio 4's Today programme about the 'enormously important' developments in academic publishing, and described open access as the best way to maximise impact of research. The new journal eLife, jointly supported by Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust, will be available later this year.

A new EU Horizon 2020 project has been announced, entitled High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure, or HIRMEOS for short. We've written on this blog numerous times about open access books, see previous posts here and here, and from what is known about this project it certainly could be a very important next step in advancing open access long-form publishing in the Humanities and Social sciences.

The Swiss National Science Foundation and swissuniversities have come together to agree a national strategy aiming for all publications financed with Swiss public money to be accessible free of charge by 2024.

The joint principles and strategy are outlined in a document published on 31 Jan 2017, which states "all stakeholders, politicians, higher education institutions (and their libraries) and funders have to join forces to pursue common goals" - including aligning existing OA policies and supporting new OA publishing models.